Famous drug addicts

First I wish to point out that I am not criticising or promoting drug use, I do not want to get dragged into the whole drugs argument. This is purely the result of reading I did for my own interest. This is also focusing on historical figures rather than present day celebrities which anybody can read about in the papers.

Sir Winston Churchill: The famous British prime minister was given large amounts of chemical stimulants by his personal physician Lord Moran. In the 1950s he became totally dependent on barbiturates – even more so after his stroke in 1953, often mixing them with copious amounts of alcohol. Churchill had names for these drugs – majors, minors, reds, greens and Lord Moran’s.

Hermann Göring, Nazi Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe: He spent a large period of his life on drugs, he spent most of World War II in a narcotic stupor. In 1925 the Swedish authorities declared Göring a dangerous drug addict and locked him in an asylum where he attacked a nurse after she refused to give him morphine. By 1937 he was hooked on codeine which is found in painkillers and cough tablets. When he was captured in 1945 he was taking roughly 100 tablets a day. It is suspected that he also took cocaine.